Saturday Morning Essay: Absurdity & the California Drought

Let us return once again to those halcyon years of Berkeley undergraduate education, so to speak, late-mid-1960's, and the storied class taught in something or other by the great Oscar Pemantle in a class entered from one of the hallways girdling the cavernous Wheeler Auditorium.

That sets the stage.  Sprawled in one of those oak chairs with the funny writing surface built into the right arm rest (were there left-handed versions? I never noticed), we studied the classics of postmodern philosophy.  Such as: The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus. Al starts with the conclusion that life is meaningless, which saves a lot of time.  No logical trickery in the style of Pascal or the other Frenchies trying to back their way into a belief in theism.  Such "proofs" are tiresome and hopeless.

The answer to the fundamental cosmological question posed by Wilhelm Gottfried von Leibniz, Why is there something instead of nothing?, is: I have no freaking idea.  That takes care of all philosophical and religious ideas and frees us up for what's left, which is phenomenology: the study of what is.

With meaninglessness as his start, Camus explores a different question. How does the feeling of Absurdity arise? Here he constructs a kind of triangle.  We have Man, who can think about ultimate questions.  We have the quest to understand. And we have a silent, implacable Universe which yields no answers.  The feeling that this arrangement engenders is the Absurd.

I was thinking along similar lines with respect to the Great California Drought.  Over the decades, one is lulled into a complacency about the availability of water.  From November to March, it rains. Never enough in Southern California to meet local needs, but with exogenous sources from the Colorado River and the reservoir system up north, it's enough.  Northern California is semi-arid, a "Mediterranean" climate, but the snowpack collected by the Sierra Nevada massif solves the problem.

That is, until the drought started in 2011, which coincided with the cessation of the La Niña pattern which had extended wet and cold conditions into May, for a couple of years. That's all a distant memory now.  Cal Tech says that California has a year of water left.

At first a catastrophe such as the California drought titillates human beings, who are always looking, unconsciously or not, for things to get dramatic about.  If you've been paying attention all along, you can feed your narcissistic supply by acting the role of soothsayer or prophet. That always gives the ego a boost.  Hey: tough guys face facts, and the tougher the facts, the tougher you are.  However, in the slightly longer run, such egotism gives way to basic animalistic fear and to a feeling of what you could call "secular" Absurdity.  This can't be happening.  This isn't real.  No advanced technological society with 38 million people suddenly finds itself with an inadequate supply of the quintessential molecule necessary to sustain human life:  H2O.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the building of a riprap barrier in the San Joaquin Delta to block the intrustion of salt water into the flow from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, which lack the flow to keep the brine out themselves.  The Chron notes during the article:  
"State officials expect to remove the wall in November as the rainy season begins." 

Sure.  Right on schedule.  It could happen that way.  Climate scientists can't tell us, at this point, one way or the other.  I think their prognostications are based on emotional biases.  If you're into abrupt climate change, you tend to read a lot into the concepts of "polar amplification," "disruption of the jet stream," "perturbed Rossby waves," "diminution of the Polar-Equator temperature gradient," and other phenomena which appear to have a scientific basis, but the problem is too complex, with too many variables, to allow confident assertions about the future in a specific region. Although a word to the wise: it's a big hint.

Somewhat ironically, the uncertainty gives rise, in this liberal state, to a species of Denialism. The drought is an "aberration."  I do not hear anyone say, for example, that even if the rains were to return for a while that this relatively wet period might itself be the "aberration."  You can point to disturbing analogous situations.  The Colorado River, fed by snow melt in the Rockies, has been declining in its flow for close to fifteen years.  Lake Mead, on which Las Vegas and Southern California are heavily dependent (Vegas almost exclusively), is nearing the point where the only way Las Vegas will be able to draw water is through tunnels under the bed of the lake.

This situation does indeed give rise to feelings of existential absurdity.  This cannot be happening, yet it is.  Life cannot be meaningless, yet it is.  Jews living in Germany, that great nation, that pinnacle of Western Civilization, had tremendous difficulty believing, in 1936, that things were as bad as they seemed, that the country had been seized by a gang of anti-Semitic thugs determined to bring about their destruction, that German Jews could be driven from their Heimat.  Yet that was exactly the case, and the far-seeing got out while there was time.

I wonder what I will do.

The Return of the Saturday Morning Essay

Whereas, in days of yore, I used to write about politics, civil liberties, America's increasingly Orwellian intrusiveness, et cetera - I find, as I enter the Golden Years, that all of these pressing "issues" have been simplified by two unavoidable and undeniable developments.

The first of these is the entrenchment of the Oligarchy as our acknowledged form of republican government.  This fits within the paradigm, occasionally observed, that yesterday's conspiracy theory is today's conventional wisdom.  This has been happening my entire adult life.  The political speeches from the Steps of Sproul Hall, which were the soundtrack of my late adolescence, were filled with references to the "power structure," "corporate control," the "military-industrial complex," "imperial wars of aggression," "environmental degradation," all of which are now commonplace admissions about the way things are.  Noam Chomsky's analysis of tight corporate control over the media and its messages, creating what he called "manufactured consent" - well, everybody knows that now. There's nothing to argue about, and not much anybody can think of to do about it.  We tried electing Barack Obama, but he was swallowed whole by the system.  He was the perfect "angry black man" to elect - he wasn't at all angry, and he wasn't really even black, in the sense of emerging from prototypical American poverty, from the projects of Bedford-Stuyvesant or Newark.   He's just cool, and the system likes cool. Barack is not Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X.  People like that can't get elected because they're serious about change, or Change, and the Oligarchy derives its power and permanence from stasis, so that the periodic spasms of electoral enthusiasm and activity  don't knock things out of kilter.  When a system is set up to enrich its owners, and only to do that, you don't want revolutions, even electoral revolutions.  You want inconsequential incrementalism, and the quadrennial dog & pony show sponsored by the Duopoly, in which the Republicans play the mouth-breathing heavies (moronic, anti-scientific, the kind of pro wrestler who would wear a black hood with eye and mouth holes), and the Democrats play the Enlightenment darlings, and nothing ever changes.

So in November, 2016 we will elect Hillary Clinton President of the United States.  She has the right Brand, she has the name recognition, she's got the patter, but mainly she has the "D" associated with her famous name and she's a woman, and electing a woman is what's playing on TV.  Electing a President in America is like guessing the right answer on Final Jeopardy: it's always going to be the most obvious answer, and Hillary is the right answer, even though we may be unclear on the question. We have to remember that we live in a country where one-fourth of the adult population believes the Sun revolves around Earth.  I admit it sort of looks that way, but if you read anything published after the death of Copernicus in 1543, you'll discover that's not the case.  No one in this country reads anything, except you.

Thus, why think about politics? Allowing Hillary to be elected (by doing nothing, including not voting) will permit the continuity the Oligarchy needs, and if you find solace in that - well then, there you go.  Plus, I admit that the vitriol and hatred the conservative side displays where Hillary is concerned is fun to observe.  The power players in D.C. on the conservative side, I'm sure, don't really share this animosity, seeing Hillary as just another opportunistic careerist who's a little better at it than they are, but it's fun to stir up a din of cacaphonous denunciation among their dumb-cluck followers.

The other issue which greatly simplifies everything is Climate Change, which, where I live out near the California coast, has become an unavoidable day-to-day disturbance in the force field.  California was a kind of unique environmental experiment, when you take a long look at it.  Fundamentally (geographically and climatically), it's mostly a desert. There's no doubt about this where Southern California is concerned.  In the L.A. Basin, a heavy rain year used to be 15 inches, but we forget that San Francisco's long-term average was only 20 inches.  Those numbers denote an arid climate.  By themselves they do not support dry-farming.  California was turned, paradoxically enough, into a great agricultural region, by a kind of trick.  The massif of the Sierra Nevada along the eastern spine of the state forces the storm clouds riding the jet stream down from the Gulf of Alaska (or along the tropical route of the Pineapple Express) to flow upward, cool, and drop snow in the mountains.  This is the whole game; everything depends on that precipitation system working. When the snowpack is in place, the spring melt fills the rivers, the rivers fill the reservoirs, and the twin acqueducts, state and federal, ship the water around to the farmers and downstate to SoCal, where it can be used to - well, survive.  The Colorado River system is a Rocky Mountain variation on the same idea. Without snow the way you keep the farms of the Central and Imperial Valleys working is by relentless depletion of the acquifers - pumping out groundwater which will take forever to replenish.  So that the inland valleys, by satellite measurement, have now sunk a full foot below the elevations pre-Drought.  To get to the water in Lake Tahoe, filled with melted snow, now requires a hike from what used to be the shore line.  The lake is so low it has fallen "below its natural rim" and the Truckee River (which takes the overspill from the lake) is bone dry.

In reliance on the Snow System, 38 million people settled in California.  More than in all of Canada, many more (on the order of 150% larger) than in all of Australia.  The snow pack is at 8% of its long-term average, the lowest figure ever recorded.  California's water miseries place into high relief the dire implications of climate change.  It leaves us with a question which ought to (but does not) disturb the thinking of our incurious citizenry, the Booboisie of Mencken's derision.  This thought is: is the California Drought a short-term cyclical aberration in precipitation patterns which has gone on a little longer than other cyclical droughts of recent decades and which is exacerbated by population growth to the aforementioned 38 million from the 22 million (about the population of Australia!) the last time this happened, this badly, in the mid 1970's?  Or is it related to such meteorological trends as Arctic Amplification, jet stream and Rossby Wave perturbations, sea-surface temperature ( SST) aberrations in the Pacific (the "Blob" of recent reporting), which are not going away because this is the planet we now live on?

One would think, and one would be dead wrong, that such a question, affecting as it does the very viability of the State of California, would receive some measure of attention. It does not. The focus is instead, to the extent there is one, on global warming in general and "conservation."  Which increasingly will raise a different question: conservation of what, exactly?